sorry clot biscuit i'll do better next time, call me luther johndross perhaps in pursuit karmic balance? it wdnt be the first time
hi allen yr right about the moralism of that article. also some of the criticisms on lucipo whether front list or backchannel to me (as i now the flarf defender in spite of never having, um, "flarfed" or read more than a handful of poems by flarfists). one posting i thought particularly bizarre in this regard it asserted on what basis i do not know that the reason that flarfists have turned, flarfy(?) is that they are 'devastated' by the sense that 'everything has already been done' and feel that they can't be 'original' in writing from their own 'self'. thus, in fear no less, they turn to google for an escape from this anxious state of not being able to be original selves. kind of you to say nice things of my reading. but really, it was shot from the hip, unedited and off the top of my head all the way thru. one poster who stared a backchannel thing wit me insisted on calling this reading of mine "superhuman" and "heroic" which i could only read as way of excusing his own unwillingness to engage the poems at all beyond his immediate Me No Likey response. anyway, below is apost i made to lucipo about the piece -- some of what i bring up has already surfaced here in other forms. * * * i have a few observations about this article. 1. Hoy insists that he is not critiquing the poems but the rhetoric/poetics surrounding them. but is sure does feel like he's critiquing the poems doesnt it? there is something a bit fishy in that i think. 2. it seems that he assumes that beyond some lineation and inputting of search terms that poets using these methods have no other input at all. i've tried to argue that this isnt the case. and if you look at some of the links gary posted here that discuss his process and nada's it seems pretty clear that there is a significant amount of work done with the 'results' and that this is then also mixed with other sources and writing by the poet designed to make all this hang together. (which leads to me contention that flarf is not so much a methodology as a shared aesthetic) 3. cage & oulipo are fine for hoy b/c they created their own methods. whereas he thinks google should get co-author credit for flarf poems. & while it may not be a problem at all for Hoy, but doesnt this usher the romantic individual in thru a side door again?--- as maker of process i am exempt even if i'm taking for my sources other corporate & ideologically suspect things like newspapers? or even books? or even words as culturally defined? (are any of these free of the taint that he finds so damning in the poems that he is not actually talking about?) 4. i rather like retallack's spin on "poethics" and the importance of awareness of process. but i have to wonder, if he is not critiquing the poems but selectively the commentary *about* the poems (which as Thomas notes, isnt exactly a model of careful scholarship), does he assume that the commentary is all there is to know? how can he be sure that flarfists are not fully cognizant of the issues he brings up? that is to say, in what way do the poems bear the mark of this unawareness -- what i have read so far seems to me at least to be fully aware of the taint of its sources. so what gives? anyway jlo
